Human Cell Atlas

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Human Cell Atlas
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Website www.humancellatlas.org

The Human Cell Atlas is a project to describe all cell types in the human body. The initiative was announced by a consortium after its inaugural meeting in London in October 2016, which established the first phase of the project. [1] [2] Aviv Regev and Sarah Teichmann defined the goals of the project at that meeting, [3] which was convened by the Broad Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Wellcome Trust. [4] Regev and Teichmann lead the project. [5]

Contents

Description

The Human Cell Atlas will catalogue a cell based on several criteria, specifically the cell type, its state, its location in the body, the transitions it undergoes, and its lineage. [6] It will gather data from existing research, and integrate it with data collected in future research projects. [2] Among the data it will collect is the fluxome, genome, metabolome, proteome, and transcriptome. [2]

Its scope is to categorize the 37 trillion cells of the human body to determine which genes each cell expresses by sampling cells from all parts of the body. [7]

All aspects of the project will be made "available to the public for free", including software and results. [8]

By April 2018, the project included more than 480 researchers conducting 185 projects. [9]

Funding

In October 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced funding for 38 projects related to the Human Cell Atlas. [10] Among them was a grant of undisclosed value to the Zuckerman Institute of the Columbia University Medical Center at Columbia University. [8] The grant, titled "A strategy for mapping the human spinal cord with single cell resolution", will fund research to identify and catalogue gene activity in all spinal cord cells. [8] The Translational Genomics Research Institute received a grant to develop a standard for the "processing and storage of solid tissues for single-cell RNA sequencing", compared to the typical practice of relying on the average of sequencing multiple cells. [10] Project home pages are available at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's website. [11]

The program is also backed by European Union, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and the Manton Foundation. [7]

Data

In April 2018, the first data set from the project was released, representing 530,000 immune system cells collected from bone marrow and cord blood. [9]

A research program at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics published an atlas of the cells of the liver, using single-cell RNA sequencing on 10,000 normal cells obtained from nine donors. [12]

The Tabula Sapiens data was published on a dedicated website [13]

See also

Notes

  1. Preidt 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 Yup 2017.
  3. Sample 2016.
  4. Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute 2016.
  5. Nowogrodzki 2017.
  6. Regev, p. 4.
  7. 1 2 Apple 2018.
  8. 1 2 3 Silva 2017.
  9. 1 2 Daley 2018.
  10. 1 2 AZ Big Media 2017.
  11. from https://www.czbiohub.org/tabula-projects/
  12. Aizarani et al. 2019.
  13. Jones RC, Karkanias J, Krasnow MA, Pisco AO, Quake SR, Salzman J, et al. (Tabula Sapiens Consortium) (May 2022). "The Tabula Sapiens: A multiple-organ, single-cell transcriptomic atlas of humans". Science. 376 (6594): eabl4896. doi:10.1126/science.abl4896. PMC   9812260 . PMID   35549404. S2CID   248748505.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Teichmann</span> German bioinformatician

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References

Further reading